


the past can be present (interlude)

by togglemaps



Series: to make us steel [3]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dissociation, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ramsay is his own warning, Rape Recovery, Trauma Recovery, black humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:11:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8449327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togglemaps/pseuds/togglemaps
Summary: Tormund Giantsbane is currently waiting. Sansa Stark is too.   "All I feel is rage and fear.” She laughs, startlingly loud and bitter. “Maybe fear is too small a word for it. I thought Winterfell would cure it, that I could rout out the rodents in my home and all would be well. Instead, I belong less to myself than ever, which I didn’t think was possible."Set during the second fic in this series, Hope and Pessimism.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic deals explicitly with what happened to Sansa in the show, and Tormund also discusses various things that have happened to him. If you're concerned about triggers, I'll put the details in the notes at the end. There is also some black humour in this, so if that isn't your cup of tea then this may not be either. 
> 
> Haven't got this beta'd, so if you catch any typos, please point them out! 
> 
> Also the last main story in this series is in the process of being edited, but I have no idea when it will be done. Soon, hopefully! The first draft ended up 19.5K, but who knows how much of that is rubbish.

Tormund tries not to, but he stews in things. Stews in how the Free Folk will survive here, survive anywhere south of the Wall. What will become of his daughters? Of the rest of the Free Folk? Living here will change them, has changed them, and it sits poorly with him, but that will only matter if they live through the coming winter. Worrying about it is pointless, yet that is sometimes all he is able to do. 

So he worries and stews and tries to pretend that he isn’t, tries to pretend that _he_ hasn’t been changed by his time south of the Wall, by his time with Jon Snow. 

That he has taken the pretty crow into his bed bothers some. Others think he has gotten himself a pretty trophy, which is as much true as not.

Jon Snow is very pretty and Tormund would show him off a little if he could.

Mostly though, the Free Folk don't care. Tormund Giantsbane sharing sleeping furs with Jon Snow is apparently less interesting than Snode creeping around behind his wife’s back or speculating about whether two of the Bear Island men are lovers. 

(A grey haired spearwife named Neisa had told him, "Be careful. You are touched by fire, Tormund Giantsbane, but so was Ygritte. Eats luck and takes it for his own, that one."

He’d laughed but she hadn’t.)

He worries about Jon too, at his certainty that death is waiting for him, that it clings to him. He has known men who had death miss them so narrowly that they always felt the cold breath of it, who couldn't leave behind the feeling of having no more life left within them.

Perhaps it isn't fair to compare the experience of a man who had been dead with men who only came close to it, but it isn't like he knows a great many formally dead men whose eyes are not an unnatural blue.

Jon Snow had been dead and isn’t any longer, isn’t sure how to be alive again. He seems to feel alive when he has his legs wrapped around Tormund's waist or when he rests his head on Tormund's chest but what does it matter if he feels alive to Tormund? It’s Jon whose death had turned out to be temporary.

Rickon trails despondently behind him as they walk up the hill towards the castle. "Hurry up, boy,” he says, and the boy reluctantly does.

"I don't know why we can't send them away," Rickon says as they pass through the gates, glaring at a Vale knight as they pass him. "We have Rhaegal and you and Won Won and Jon. We don't need _him_."

"They saved our asses. Least we can do is be hospitable." 

"Not when they're trying to kiss my sister," Rickon insists. "You don't know what the servants say about Ramsay and Sansa. You don’t know what _he_ was like.”

He has some idea. When he went with Mance Raydor to unite all the free folk, Mance would sit and talk with the leaders, sing for them, fight them sometimes. Tormund would talk to the cooks and the washerwomen and they always knew far more than men like Mance thought they did, though Mance himself learned in time.

His mother had been one of those women and, though she had been no spearwife, she had always had a say in the goings on in their village. She had possessed knowledge and cunning and no fear of using it. He wishes he had more of her in him, or at least had understood her more before her death. He could use some cunning now. He cannot shake the idea that if she were here, she would know what to do with all these slippery southerners. 

He had been curious about this horrid man who had brutalised Sansa Stark and threatened to skin all the free folk at the Wall, even the children. So, after the battle, he had bathed and combed his hair and his beard and gone to the kitchens and talked and laughed and flirted and eaten with the servants there. They had told him all that they knew, which was closer to everything that had happened than he thinks Sansa Stark would like. He knows what it is to want your sufferings to be more private than they are. 

He pities her. Understands her a little, too. Some time after his second daughter had been born, his heart had shrunk and his body had been lost to him for a time. He isn’t sure why it happened, only that it did and that it does and that his heart and body are his own again now. 

He had crouched beside his sister as she died choking on her own blood and felt nothing. It hadn’t simply been that he hadn’t felt grief or sadness or longing, though he hadn’t, but that he hadn’t felt his feet on the ground beneath him or her hand in his. He had stared down at her and watched her die and felt his own body drift away from him. 

It couldn’t have been that which did it though. He had seen others die before, even another sibling. Their brother had died of fever when they were very young and the boy only just old enough to have a name. 

It was what it was. It could only be accepted, not changed. 

When they reach the castle proper, he makes sure to grab the back of Rickon’s neck. Rickon tends to try and avoid his lessons with the Maester, so Tormund takes him either to Sansa Stark or the Maester directly. It matters little to him but Jon Snow insists it is important and, until it is decided they should march back to the Wall, he has little to do but stew in his fears and fuck. Jon Snow is a busy man, which means he doesn’t do half as much of the latter as he’d like. 

Sansa Stark is with the Maester when he leaves Rickon with him, and she asks Tormund to walk with her back to her solar. He doesn’t know what a solar is and doesn’t care enough to know to ask, but he follows her regardless. 

She sits behind a large desk and he sits opposite her. Her chair is large and his is small. Kneelers have all sorts of ways of telling the high from the low, all sorts of ways of telling a person how small they are. He hadn’t thought being almost too big to fit into a chair could make a person feel small and insignificant inside, where it counts, but it did. 

He ignores the feeling, the same way he ignored it when Mance made him feel small and stupid. 

He is not small. He is not stupid. He is strong and he may not know everything these kneelers think he should but he’s Tormund Giantsbane and he earned his name with his strength and his wits and he won’t let these people make him forget. 

“I wanted to thank you,” she says. “You’ve done a lot for my family.” 

“My people—” 

“No. You. I was there when you spoke for Jon with the other free folk. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t done that. I don’t know where we’d be, but it wouldn’t be here.” For a moment, she looks far away and it takes ten, twenty seconds before she snaps back into place, her eyes going from glazed to sharp in the literal blink of an eye. They flick around the room, her breath shallow and rasping. 

He waits until her breath has settled and her eyes return to his to say, “You’d still have your Vale army.” 

“What worth is somebody else’s army?” She grimaces and her face looks almost lopsided as she does so. It’s an ugly thing to look on. “I would have been safer with Littlefinger, it’s true, but it would have been only a matter of degrees. The Stark’s must be strong again. We have to be. That’s all that stops—” She falters, falls silent. She has a hand resting on top of her desk and it curls into a fist. "All I feel is rage and fear.” She laughs, startlingly loud and bitter. “Maybe fear is too small a word for it. I thought Winterfell would cure it, that I could rout out the rodents in my home and all would be well. Instead, I belong less to myself than ever, which I didn’t think was possible." 

He hesitates, then says, "I had such feelings once. All was emptiness and blackness and fear. I felt far away from myself, my physical self. We say a person can be soul sick, though we may not see any wounds."

She stares at him silently for a long time. "You’re better now,” she says, finally. She does not believe him, thinks he is telling her lies born of kindness. 

"Much. Different than I was before, maybe, but my life became my own again, with help." 

"Help?" 

"A healer named Neisa. She returned me to my body before anything else, placed her hands on me until my body was a little more mine again." He had cried against her more times than he could count, harsh wracking sobs that sounded even to himself as though he was dying. "Perhaps it seems foolish—”

"No," she says. "I feared I was going mad. That I was—there was a queen in the South. In King's Landing. She was cruel, and bitter. I worried that was what I was. That I was her."

"You don’t seem cruel to me, Sansa Stark. You’re lucky. Kissed by fire, as I am."

She frowns, then touches her hair. She smiles a little, short and fleeting. “Kissed by fire. I like that. Would your soul healer be willing to see me?"

He shrugs. "I will ask." 

“It isn’t that I think that I’m not strong enough as I am to survive the coming fight. It isn’t that. You know that, don’t you?” Her eyes plead with him to understand, to know that she can be this and strong all at once. 

“Of course I know. Anyone who looked at you and thought you were anything but strong is a fool.”

“The Stark’s must be strong again. That includes me and it will include you and your people too, I promise you that.” 

Neither of them say anything for a long time. When her eyes finally look to his again, she looks surprised. 

She had forgotten he was in the room. 

 

He stops in the kitchens on his way back to the free folk camp, sitting with the kitchen women while they talk and eat. One woman has only two fingers on her left hand but she struggles only a little with her bowl of food. The missing fingers are new, but not so new that she hasn’t worked out a new way of doing things yet. She sees him looking and she stares definitely at him, stretching her maimed hand out on the table. 

He just looks back and after a moment she looks away and then back, frowning. His wife had lost the tips of two fingers to frostbite before their daughters were born. There is always a place inside him that aches because she is dead. If he couldn’t have her back just as she was, then he would keep the ache, the reminder that she existed at all. 

He thanks the women for the meal and a few flirt with him as he leaves. One white haired woman with only two remaining teeth grabs a hold of his ass as he walks past, squeezing. He stares at her, shocked, then laughs when she waggles her overgrown eyebrows at him. 

One day these people will stop surprising him but that day is not today. 

His father’s mother had lived to be that woman’s age and she had flirted happily with men young enough to be her great grandchildren right up until the day she died. He hadn’t thought kneelers made women like her, but he was wrong. 

 

Unfortunately, the healer Neisa is one of the most annoying people he has ever met. She’s known him since he was a too tall, too skinny boy with limbs so long he didn’t know what to do with them. This means that she has long since decided she is allowed to take any liberties she feels like, which include treating him like a particularly slow five year old. 

More concerning would be if she suddenly decided to treat him seriously. It would mean the situation was so serious that she has made herself see him as he is, rather than as he was. That she needs him to be a man grown, strong enough to hold their people together through the long night. 

He isn’t that man. That man doesn’t exist. If the free folk survive the long night it’s going to be by a combination of the grace of the Old Gods and some unbelievable luck. 

_Genuinely_ unbelievable luck. As in, if it happens he isn’t sure he’s going to be able to believe it. 

When she sees him coming, she takes the lump of bread she’s eating and throws it at his head. He catches it and tosses it back. Wouldn’t be right to eat someone else’s food, even if they’re lobbing it at your head and therefore deserve it. He sits beside her and she rips a piece of the bread off with her teeth and begins to chew. Once she’s done, she grabs his beard and tugs. It isn’t a light tug, though it isn’t hard enough to actually rip the hair from his face, which he supposes is all that really matters. 

“Why are you here, little fawn?” she asks. 

He huffs. “Here as in beyond the Wall, here as in Winterfell or here as in sitting and talking to you?” 

“You think you’re far cleverer than you are, little fawn. You should be careful about that. It might get you in to trouble with your crow.” She makes a disapproving sound and shakes her head. 

“The first thing is true, the crow thing I’ll have to argue with you about.” 

“Oh lets not. That sounds boring.” 

“It does,” he agrees. 

“My first question still stands. How about you answer it so it can sit down hmm?” 

He rolls his eyes. “Sansa Stark is struggling a bit. With—well, the Bolton who wanted to skin us all was her husband. Cheerful fella by all accounts. Awful as well, of course, but cheerful.” 

“Well, so long as he was cheerful while he was skinning people.” 

“That is what’s important.” 

She rubs at her chin, which has a spattering of thick grey hairs. “You suggested to the Stark girl I might be able to help her, little fawn?” She frowns. “I could try I suppose, but who knows if anything works the same south of the Wall, never mind if it would work with Southerners at all.” She eyes a Mormont man who is walking past them suspiciously. “These Southerners… they’re different, you know.” 

“I thought so too. Turned out they aren’t as different as I thought.” 

She snorts. “You think the Stark girl is anything like me? Or your girls?” 

“More than you might think.” 

"Do you think she understands war? Do you think your pretty crow does? That war can only be endured and only won once the deeds are nothing more than song?" Neisa asks.

"No,” he admits. “But I don’t think them being Southerners has much to do with that.” They are still too young yet to understand it. He has fought many wars in his time and they all live in his bones.

She sighs, a long, quiet sound that somehow makes him feel better, not worse. After, she says, “Children. They are children.” 

He scrunches his face up and she laughs at him. “Fine,” she says. “They are young. Perhaps that is good. Perhaps it’s the old who will be the first to die.” She pats him on the arm. “I’ll go see the Stark girl. You can take me up to see her tomorrow,” she says, like getting to show her to Winterfell was a privilege he should thank her for. 

He thanks her, for Sansa Stark’s sake and because his mama raised him to be polite to people who were already greybeards before he even had a name.

**Author's Note:**

> Sansa isn't overly specific about what happened to her, but she does discuss symptoms of what we would call PTSD and dissociation. Tormund, being noisy, has discovered what happened to her via gossiping servants, though he doesn't explicitly describe it either. There is also discussion of Ramsey's tendency to skin people and one of the servants has had some of her fingers removed. 
> 
> Tormund also thinks about two instances from his (non-canon) past, one where he dissociates while watching his sister die and another involving his brother dying from a fever when they were both very young.


End file.
